A Question For Atheists.

Please do your best to respond to this post. I won't insult you if you don't insult me.

Cause and effect. How can something come out of nothing? How could the very first thing that happened to start the universe not be effected by anything? It has to go back and back and back until one thing that effected something without being caused. That, I believe, was a god. Can somebody please prove this point wrong?

Replies to This Discussion

Its amazing to me that"believers", have no problem believing in an all powerful god that has always existed and had no creator, yet they have a hard time imagining that the universe may have come from the big bang.

I have to ask you "what is that about"? Is this where you throw common sense, logic and rational thinking out the window in order to hang on to your "Faith"? Why would you even consider jumping to the conclusion of a god, simply because we don't have the answers yet? Fear maybe?

Science may not have all the answers (YET), but at least their working on them.

First, you must understand that the origin of the universe is a separate question from the existence of god. One can be agnostic with regard to the first and still be atheist with regard to the second. Assuming they are a single question is proof of circular reasoning on some level.

Second, your reasoning is exactly the same used by primitive man to reach the conclusion that the Earth must be flat and held up by a god. They had no idea how it could be otherwise because their everyday experience on Earth told them it was impossible. What they (and you) didn't understand is that they were extrapolating their experience to a situation that was completely different and completely alien to them. What they (and you) didn't understand was they were not just comparing apples to oranges, they were comparing apples to airplanes. Please read the essay at this link:

For most of our species' existence, we believed that we were the center of the universe. It was only fairly recently that we realized we're a bi-product of it. What if the very implication that matter requires a beginning is a result of your perceptual bias towards the universe, a reflection of the human ego? "You" have an observable beginning and end, therefore somehow all of existence must as well? You are not an accurate representation of the universe. You are a bi-product of one of its phases. Have some humility.

"In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded." - Marcello Truzzi

With that in mind, perhaps we can agree that the post is more of a thought experiment than an assertion of truth. So setting science and reason aside, let's do it. Say that once upon a time there was nothing, and then suddenly something that simply came to be; and let's say that this something was the starting point for everything that we know and have yet to know. Let's say even that we as humans come to know of this thing and agree to call this thing god.

What then? Is this thing still present or has it faded away? How do you know if this thing still affects what is happening to us and our tiny world? How do you know if this thing was directly the creator of all or just the first domino that tipped? If it was just simply the starting point, then of what consequence is it to say that you believe in it? Forgive me, but I still fail to see why, if this were in any way true, I should then adhere to faith, religion, and theism.

If you’re unable to accept the state of nothingness as a plausible beginning to our universe, yet you wish us to accept your god hypothesis, then we can simply apply your question to this hypothesis and ask: what created your god and what created that and so on.

But, we don’t even need to go as far as to even evoke a god to address the question. Science tells us that “nothing” is the most unstable state in the universe and that “something” is more likely (statistically speaking) than “nothing.” So, the fact that we have something rather than nothing is really unremarkable and is what one would expect.

I think the most important thing to note is that you’ve asked us to prove your point wrong without first being able to prove that your belief is correct or even remotely plausible. Provide us the evidence that we need to even consider your point, otherwise why would anyone waste their time and effort attempting to prove it wrong?

Lastly, “god did it” is not an acceptable place-holder for questions for which we do not currently hold the answer. History has shown that such questions have been replaced by knowledge, thus “I don’t know” is a more logical place-holder than “god did it.”

I think I've had the chance to look at most of the replies and I won't belabor the scientific arguments--many much smarter and more capable than I have already made those. So I'll skip the physics and head right for its meta counterpart, since your argument is easily traced to Aristotle's "first cause" or "unmoved mover."

I should add, though, that modern metaphysics, I argue, isn't "static" and as we learn new scientific truths, this can inform our philosophical thinking--since it often opens up possibilities that we had not considered before simply because we had no frame of reference with which to consider them--so what to Aristole (or Aquinas) might have seemed the natually logical conclusion no longer holds water, or space, for that matter, with our added knowledge of how the universe actually works. Aristotle assumed a perfect being for the "wholeness and orderliness" in the world as he knew it. The physics, however, we know today, informs us of other possibilities (even the possibility of something seemingly simpler causing something seemingly more complex--the creation of a universe from a singularity, for example). This notion, by the way, isn't all that unusual in the natural world--just look at the development of a seemingly simple single-celled embryo into a seemingly more complex, thinking human being.

With that background, your assertion that the "cause" of the universe was a god contains a huge leap in logic that does not follow from your premises. As I understand it (and accepting, for sake of argument, your assumption that there must be, as a metaphysical cosmologist might call it, a "first cause") your syllogism is this: There was a "thing" that caused the universe to exist. That thing must have existed without being caused by anything else. Therefore that thing was a god.

When broken down like this, you can immediately see the premises do not lead logically (or exclusively) to a god/creator unless by "god" you mean anything that exists without having been itself created by anything else, which I doubt is your meaning. Nothing in the premises indicate that the "thing" that created the universe must have any powers (particulary, deity-like powers, let alone "perfect" powers). Moreover, there is nothing in the premises that excludes other non-god "things" from creating the universe or that there must be only ONE such "thing." How do you know that multiple things didn't get together to create the universe? Or how do we know that the thing's only ability is to make a single singularlity that randomly kick starts a universe with random properties? Indeed, for all we know, the thing could simply be the scatological remnants of a pink unicorn and that, as a reult, all the known universe is contained within a giant pink unicorn fart (my preferred explanation of "The Big Bang," by the way).

I argue that even is one assumes a "first cause" nothing about that "first cause" can be ultimately known other than it's mere existence and any notion of "god" as that first cause is therefore a fallacy.

All you philosphers out there feel free to point out my philosophical inadequacies.

Even if you assume that a creator was necessary, all you have is "something created the universe". That's also the failure of the Kalam cosmological argument. As you said, you still don't know whether it's really a god - maybe it's just some insanely powerful entity. Even if it is a god, which one is it? The Muslim one? The Christian one? One of the Hindu ones? Or maybe some African tribal god? And we still don't know why the creator of the universe cares about what we eat, when we work and how we sex, and how he communicates those wishes to us.

If I understand correctly, I believe it is the theist/god believers position that something came from nothing. According to the Abrahamic faiths, Jewish/Christian/Islam god popped out of no where, from nothing and after speaking some magical incantations, created every thing! (with absolutely NO demonstrable explanation of what or where the god comes from)

To be perfectly honest, I personally have No Idea what initiated the origins of the universe or even life! Yet there is absolutely no reason or rationality for me to entertain the notion that any of this was a product of magical spells, incantations or charms.